Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Origin and Early Development of the English Universities to the Close of the Thirteenth Century: A Study in Institutional History
Another in?uence is to be found in the curriculum of the preceding age. There was no sudden movement or discovery; the revival of the eleventh and twelfth centuries grew out of the old conditions, and it may not be too much to say that its direction was completely determined by those conditions, as, for instance, the revival of logic at Paris, of law at Bologna, and of medicine at Salerno. It is necessary, then, to notice more closely the tra ditional education inherited from the past. As has already been indicated, the object of this education was ecclesiastical, that is, to expound the scriptures and the writings of the church fathers. For the proper understanding of these a certain amount of secular education was considered necessary, represented by the elementary trivium, grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and by the more advanced quadrivium, music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. The content of the quadrivium was very meager before the twelfth century renaissance, and so the secular education of the dark ages was in reality the trivium.
Before the time of Charles the Great the secular culture that had survived was based upon the Latin classics and sometimes upon the Roman law, but at this time the heart and center of sec ular education in Northern Europe had become dialectics or logic. This was the one study of the past that the student was encour aged to make his own, not only because it could not be regarded as pagan in its in?uence but also because it was thought essen tial for the right comprehension and teaching of Christian truth.
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